Jon Udell is a widely known "uber-geek" who was a columnist for InfoWorld until early last year and a chief architect for O'Reilly's Safari online book service. He lives right here in Keene so we've bumped into each other a few times over the seven years I've been here. In one of my previous blogs, he read about my vision of an eKeene and we found that we had a shared interest.

Dries Buytaert put out his predictions for Drupal for 2008. Of note, it's reassuring that the community realizes that this year will be as much about marketing of the product as the product itself. It would be a drastic shame if Drupal became the Betamax of CMSes. An interesting point that surprised me was the integration with Flex...didn't see that coming as Flex is a proprietary, Adobe based, technology.

This is the second in a series of blog entries regarding why we, at Lucidus, decided to switch from Joomla to Drupal for our primary content management system. This one is about security...

Robust, Tightly Integrated Security
The Joomla security infrastructure was extremely limited in terms of configuration options.

The change of seasons has coincided with a number of accomplishments for Lucidus this year.

Where should I start? Our first accomplishment is a big one. We have moved our Lucidus headquarters in New Hampshire to another, larger location in the heart of Keene, at Colony Mill Marketplace.

One of the most valuable services we provide as an "Internet Strategy & Services" firm is to seek out "best-of-breed" web applications (typically open source) for our customers and recommend them. As recently as a year ago, we were recommending Joomla/Mambo for content management to our clients. Late last year we changed course and made the transition to Drupal as our best-of-breed recommendation. Over the next few weeks, I'll delve into the reasons why we chose to make the switch. Today's reason is the simplicity of finding and editing web pages within Drupal.

Holy cow! Cedarcrest Center for Children with Disabilities has given us an award! You heard right, Neil Giarratana (our distinguished president) and the rest of the Lucidus team have been awarded the 2007 Cedarcrest Center Champion Award.

Now if you really want to read the press release, please go right ahead. But here in the blog I want to take a few minutes from my own point of view to toot our horn a bit -- we deserve it! Cedarcrest says so!

I'm so excited –– once again our very talented team of developers has been recognized by our peers to be on the cutting edge of development.

Speaking geek to geek is a great way for our team to share our experiences with others, which in the end helps us all to leverage our collective experiences on a GLOBAL level.

CFUnited Europe, a Coldfusion development conference "run by developers, for developers" announced this month that Chaz Chumley, an Application Developer at Lucidus, will speak at the conference.

This month Lucidus has joined Chamber South, a business group in South Miami. One of my goals this year is to become a more familiar face to businesses in Miami and South Florida in general. It seems to me that being part of Chamber South and other business groups will be an important part of that.

It was a bit weird this morning delivering my Selling You & Your Services presentation to our Greater Keene Chamber of Commerce B2B Breakfast. Many of the stories I present surround businesses local to Keene; although they are positive, it's still weird because you worry about mentioning one and not another. Moreover, I'm "revealing secrets" of how we systematizing delivery of top notch service as well as close business deals. Regardless, it was a lot of fun and nice to see so many familiar faces.

We've been going back and forth over the last year on an integrated authentication/authorization mechanism. We implemented our own LDAP server and built LDAP libraries that have worked but seemed to over complicate the entire authentication process.